Episode 2 – Vitalism

The call came at six in the morning.

Joy was on his second coffee, staring at the guest list from the gala. Two hundred and fourteen names. Businessmen, doctors, politicians, socialites, a former minister, a Bollywood producer, and for some reason a tabla player and a Retired Judge that Joy kept circling back to even though he couldn’t explain why.

Johns had fallen asleep on the office couch with his shoes on and his notebook open on his chest. He looked peaceful. Joy had considered waking him twice and decided against it both times.

Some people sleep like the world isn’t on fire, Joy thought. He had never been one of them.

The call at 6 changed everything…..

A woman found unconscious in a parking garage. Bruising on the neck, both sides, placed in a way the attending paramedic described as unusual…. Precise…..Deliberate….

The duty officer had read Joy’s preliminary report from the Nadia Ferreira case …. Had seen the same words in the same order. Bilateral! Precise! Deliberate!

He had called Joy directly.

It was good police work. The unglamorous, undramatic kind that nobody writes about but that occasionally changes everything.

Honest, plain and quiet work goes by without a show, yet changes all the world in ways we’ll never know….

Joy had read the paramedic’s description once and put his coffee down.

Her name was Rhea Sodhi. Thirty-one years old. Attacked in the parking garage of a restaurant called Folklore, a place that charged the kind of money that made you feel embarrassed about enjoying the food….

Rhea was found by a valet who had gone looking for a car and found something else entirely.

She was alive….. Barely….

Joy crossed the room and put his hand on Johns’ shoulder.

“Second victim,” he said.

Johns sat up instantly, reached for his jacket, and was at the door before Joy had picked up his keys. That was the thing about Johns that Joy never said out loud. He was that friend, when it mattered, the man moved like the world depended on it…

Because sometimes it did.

The hospital corridor smelled of antiseptic and quiet dread. The attending doctor met them outside the room, spoke in a low voice, and handed Joy the preliminary report.

Joy read it standing in the corridor without moving.

The bruising on Rhea’s neck. Same location as Nadia’s. Same depth. Same precise placement, one on each side, like someone who had done it before or had spent a very long time thinking about how to do it.

“Same person,” Johns said, reading over his shoulder.

“Yes.”

“You could occasionally react like a human being.”

“I am reacting. This is my reacting face.” replied Joy

Johns stared at him. “It looks exactly like your other face.”

“I know.” said Joy

They went in.

Rhea Sodhi was small, quietly composed in the way that some people are composed because they have decided that falling apart is a luxury they cannot afford right now….

She was sitting up in the hospital bed when they walked in, hands folded in her lap, looking out of the window at a sky that had not yet decided whether it wanted to be morning or not.

She turned when she heard them.

She looked directly at Joy the moment he walked through the door.

Not at Johns….At Joy.

“I was wondering when you’d come,” she said.

Joy stopped mid step. Something shifted in the room. He couldn’t name it immediately.

“We haven’t met,” he said.

“No.” She looked down at her hands for a moment. Then back up. “But Nadia talked about you. About three weeks ago she told me something. She said, if anything ever happens to me, find the detective named Joy.” A pause.

“She said you’d actually care.”

The room went quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when something important has just shifted the floor beneath everyone standing on it.

Johns looked at Joy.

Joy looked at Rhea.

“Three weeks ago,” Joy said carefully. “She knew something was going to happen to her…..?”

“She was afraid. She didn’t tell me everything…” Rhea’s voice stayed steady but her eyes couldn’t…. “I kept asking her to go to the police. She kept saying she wasn’t ready. That she needed to be sure first.” She stopped, wiping her tears “I should have pushed harder…..”

“Did she tell you who she was afraid of?”

Rhea was quiet for a moment. In the corridor outside a trolley went past, wheels squeaking against the floor, someone’s ordinary morning continuing at full volume against their very different one.

“She said it was someone everyone likes,” Rhea said finally. “Someone who is always smiling in photographs.” She looked at Joy directly. “She said that was exactly why nobody would believe it. That the most dangerous people in this city don’t look dangerous at all. They look like the last person you’d ever suspect…”

Joy thought about the guest list in his jacket pocket. Two hundred and fourteen people, most of them photographed smiling at something their entire adult lives.

“Did she give you a name,” he said.

“No. She said the less I knew the safer I was…..” Rhea’s composure cracked for just a second, like a hairline fracture in glass….”She was trying to protect me.”

The irony of that sat in the room like something with weight.

Joy let it sit.

He asked one final question from the doorway on the way out.

“The person who attacked you. Did you see anything at all? Any detail. However small.”

Rhea closed her eyes briefly. The gesture of someone going back somewhere they didn’t want to go.

“It was dark…..” she said. “It happened fast…..” A pause. “But there was a ring. On their right hand. Gold, with some kind of crest or symbol on it. Like an old family seal. I think it was a lion with one paw raised, a sword behind it, some words curled into it” She touched her own shoulder, showing the mark…. “It pressed into me when they grabbed me.”

Johns was already writing.

Joy looked at her for a moment longer than necessary.

“You’re safe here,” he said. “We have someone outside your door.”

Rhea nodded.

She didn’t look entirely convinced.

Joy wasn’t entirely convinced either.

Outside the hospital the afternoon heat landed on them both like a physical thing….

Johns flipped back through his notebook. “Old family crest. Gold ring. That’s something.”

“It’s forty families in this city minimum.”

“Still narrower than two hundred and fourteen.”

“Johns.”

“Yeah.”

Joy looked back at the hospital building. At the window on the third floor where Rhea Sodhi was sitting in a bed that was not her own, in a city that had already tried to kill her once.

“She survived,” he said. “Which means whoever did this knows she survived.”

Johns followed his gaze. He understood immediately, the way he always understood the things that mattered.

“He’ll come back for her,” he said quietly.

“We’re not leaving her alone. Not tonight. Not until we know what she saw.”

They went back inside.

It was only later, driving home at 9 PM with the city sliding past the windows and Johns quiet in the passenger seat, that the thing Joy had been carrying all day finally surfaced.

He turned it over carefully.

Nadia Ferreira had been afraid for three weeks. She had known something. Had been careful enough not to tell her closest friend, trying to protect her. Had been thorough enough to leave a name behind. One name. A detective she had never met.

She had done everything right, Joy thought. She had been intelligent and careful and she had still ended up in a corridor in a gold dress with one heel on and one heel off.

That was the part about this job that never got easier. The people who deserved to survive and didn’t. The people who did everything right and it still wasn’t enough….

“You’re thinking too loud,” Johns said from the passenger seat.

“I’m always thinking.” replied joy

“I know. Tonight it’s louder than usual.”

Joy said nothing for a moment.

“She named me,” he said finally. “Nadia. She had never met me. She found my name somewhere, from someone, and decided I was worth trusting. Three weeks before she died she handed that name to her best friend like a lifeline.”

“That’s not a burden,” Johns said.

“No,” Joy said. “It’s a responsibility. There’s a difference.”

Johns looked out of the window.

“We’ll find him,” he said.

“Yes,” Joy said.

He believed it.

What neither of them had asked yet was the question that would crack everything open.

Not who attacked Rhea Sodhi….

But why.

Nadia was dead. The one person who knew the truth was gone. Silencing her made sense. But Rhea???

They drove the rest of the way in silence…..

At 11 PM Joy’s phone rang.

It was Shinde, the officer posted outside Rhea’s hospital room. His voice was tight in the specific way voices get tight when something has happened that the person on the other end doesn’t fully understand yet.

“Sir,” he said. “You need to come back.”

“What happened?”

“Someone got into her room”

Joy was already standing. “Is she hurt.”

“No. She’s shaken. The person was stopped before…..” A pause. “You need to see this yourself”

Joy looked at Johns across the office.

Johns was already reaching for his jacket.

The corridor outside Rhea’s room looked different at night. Quieter. The kind of quiet that makes every small sound feel significant.

Two more officers had arrived by the time Joy and Johns got there, standing near the door with the slightly uncertain energy of people waiting to be told what the situation actually was.

Joy pushed the door open.

Rhea was sitting upright in bed, knees pulled to her chest, looking at the window. She turned when Joy walked in. Her composure, which had held through everything, had finally developed a crack.

“He was standing right there,” she said. She pointed at the corner of the room near the bathroom door. “Right there. Just standing.”

“What did he look like,” Joy said.

“Dark jacket. Gloves. Something over his face.” She pressed her lips together. “He wasn’t a doctor… not a nurse…He was just standing there in the dark looking at me.”

“What happened then.”

“I screamed. He ran. Your officer showed up thirty seconds later!” she said, her tone edged with disappointment.

Joy turned to the officer in the doorway, in anger and disappointment…. “Which way did he go?”

Officer Shinde shifted uncomfortably before admitting, with visible embarrassment, “Sir… we had stepped out for a cup of tea. I’m sorry, sir….”

“Pch… I don’t care about that. Which way did he go?” Joy snapped, his voice edged with anger.

Shinde replied, visibly embarrassed, “Stairwell at the end of the corridor. We lost him at the ground floor exit…..we came really close but…” Joy turned his face away from them, as if even hearing them felt like tolerating failure…

Johns was already on his phone, pulling the hospital’s CCTV contacts.

Joy stood in the middle of the room and looked at the corner where the man had been standing. Then at the window. Then at the door.

Dark jacket. Gloves. Face covered.

Coming to a hospital room at 11 PM.

Standing in the corner watching a sleeping woman rather than doing whatever he had come to do.

Joy looked at the corner again.

Something about that bothered him. He couldn’t locate it precisely yet.

He pulled his coat tighter.

“You’re not alone tonight,” he told Rhea. “Two officers. Inside the room.”

Rhea nodded. She didn’t look entirely convinced.

Joy wasn’t entirely convinced either.

Outside in the corridor he looked at Johns.

“Same person?” Johns said quietly.

Joy looked at the stairwell door at the end of the corridor.

“I don’t know…” he said.

Looking back at Rhea inside the room, Joy found himself asking the same question again and again…..

Who is the masked man?

What did Rhea know? What had Nadia told her that was dangerous enough to make someone drive to a parking garage in broad daylight and press their thumbs into her neck?

Or was it not about what Rhea knew at all….

(Across the history of every investigation ever conducted, one question that has persistently lingered above all others is “Why?”)

Hey lovelies, If you liked the blog, consider sharing it with your friends and family. It helps the story travel further than it ever could on its own.

You can reach out with your thoughts, suggestions, or even the harshest reviews at Socratesatwork.2608@gmail.com or through The Da Vinny Code , or simply comment below. Every message, in its own way, adds to the journey.

And if you’d like to stay along for what comes next, don’t forget to subscribe and click the like button below.